I have similar feelings about the thunderhorse. Took it to Siberia and an some asshole nazi tanker fired a shell inside. The gals were all in assault armor so they were fine but all the extra gear got vaporized. Shortly after it was scrapped in favor of a nice and cozy drakkar.

The open ramps of the Thunderhorse and Menace class are not made to make the ship a safe fire base, they are made to deploy your crew of Mayhem and Destruction. The Thunderhorse has slots for two tanks to soak up reaction fire, or just lots of gals that can burn down with massed fire, any foes you see. These craft are for Shock and Awe. It can be a definite change for someone who is used to having nice doors to protect them from earlier craft.

I don't need the doors to protect the gals, I need them to protect my precious stuff. In that Siberia mission I cleared out like 2/3 of the surface in the first turn and then ducked back in. On the enemies turn the tank rolled by and shot. There's not much you can do if a stray shot or grenade lands even slightly inside the craft. Shock and awe is all well and good but being forced to deploy all the gals out in the first turn in such a way as to protect the craft from stray fire, regardless of the tactical disposition outside, strikes me as a somewhat ridiculous constraint in a dropship.

At any rate I decided that tanks are useless and that I prefer smaller teams anyway so I'm sticking with the drakkar until Cydonia.

The open ramps of the Thunderhorse and Menace class are not made to make the ship a safe fire base, they are made to deploy your crew of Mayhem and Destruction. The Thunderhorse has slots for two tanks to soak up reaction fire, or just lots of gals that can burn down with massed fire, any foes you see. These craft are for Shock and Awe. It can be a definite change for someone who is used to having nice doors to protect them from earlier craft.

Beautiful approach. And it works. Against weaker enemy. If your enemy has shields, invisibility, nukes, superior personal weapons in terms of firepower and accuracy, superior reaction and can kill your elites in your best armor with single shot... then it is suicide.

In other words open ramp ship is excellent against weak enemy that you can perfectly defeat without open ramp ship. Kinda useless... but maybe one day I will discover its advantages.

I wouldn't say tanks are useless but they are situational. They can usually soak up a hell of a lot of reaction fire (that would otherwise be putting holes in your gals) and they make pretty good mobile cover. It's pretty nice to have one for Pogroms.

Beautiful approach. And it works. Against weaker enemy. If your enemy has shields, invisibility, nukes, superior personal weapons in terms of firepower and accuracy, superior reaction and can kill your elites in your best armor with single shot... then it is suicide.

Different codexes have no bearing on the late mid-end game open ramp ships. Once you get past early game, almost all of the larger assault craft are open ramp concept. A different codex might give you tools to be more aggressive, but often those tools are late to end game.

Regarding the summoning circle, you might as well keep it, it only spawns a single 1x1 unit, usually just a low rank one. Considering you start with someone in the room with them, its usually just a matter of walk a few steps and apply melee.

It was Star Gods Terror Ship on desert map. I tried several times, reloading to turn 1, but in open terrain, with only custom power armor and 2 tanks, but without shields or assasin armor spotters it was slaughter every single time. Simply not possible at my current tech level. And I defeated them during Mutant Pogrom in urban area using Turtle and no tanks, and only thing that threatened my victory was destruction of rear door. To stand in open outside the craft and survive against Star Gods I need better gear, but with me getting better gear they will loose part of their superiority and will be less dangerous enemy. And if I defeat them in open battle with better gear, my success will be attributed to that gear, not the ship I disembark from.

Different codexes have no bearing on the late mid-end game open ramp ships. Once you get past early game, almost all of the larger assault craft are open ramp concept. A different codex might give you tools to be more aggressive, but often those tools are late to end game.

Regarding the summoning circle, you might as well keep it, it only spawns a single 1x1 unit, usually just a low rank one. Considering you start with someone in the room with them, its usually just a matter of walk a few steps and apply melee.

I am pretty sure that at least 2 enemy units spawned there, but not 100% sure. The bad thing is all hands in that base were recruits, who saw combat only once. They had impressive period of training in dojos, but training doesn't improve reactions, so their initiative was rather bad. And they even wasn't armed for melee. Good thing is I was playing in "spectator" mode, checking if Reticulans already left bars on Alpha Centauri and reached Earth. Attack occured only because I ignored enemy ship that was searching for my bases. EDIT:I decided that SC will stay, since it is research base, but lesson is learned and I will rebuild Hyperwave Decoder there to minimalize possibility of detection and attack.

It was Star Gods Terror Ship on desert map. I tried several times, reloading to turn 1, but in open terrain, with only custom power armor and 2 tanks, but without shields or assasin armor spotters it was slaughter every single time. Simply not possible at my current tech level. And I defeated them during Mutant Pogrom in urban area using Turtle and no tanks, and only thing that threatened my victory was destruction of rear door. To stand in open outside the craft and survive against Star Gods I need better gear, but with me getting better gear they will loose part of their superiority and will be less dangerous enemy. And if I defeat them in open battle with better gear, my success will be attributed to that gear, not the ship I disembark from.

There's a simple solution for that problem, run away, run far, run fast (at least until you have the tools to deal with star gods).

I have registered to this forum because I ran into an issue while playing this mod. So I haven't experienced any bugs, glitches or anything with exception of a typo in one place perhaps but now I've run into something odd. So it's the third base invasion (the ones invading are the dark ones faction I think, the not-doom guys anyway). So in the preliminary stage I shoot them with my building (vaults iirc) and so it hits, doesn't destroy them and then I have the battle in my base. With some struggle I clear them all by turn 15 or so. Now, the battle doesn't end at all.

Moving on, by turn 20 this bug hunt mode activates and tells me that there are enemies visible on the minimap. So I look and browse the entire four levels and I see nothing. There are no enemies in sight. The turns just keep rolling, I figured there would be a surrender trigger but no. Therefore I engaged on a hunt with my vast numerically superior forces and combing through the base I was unable to find any enemies either. It's now turn 200 and everyone keeps going insane every second turn.

What do I do at this point? Is this a glitch? The battle won't end on one hand and bug hunt won't show any enemies on another. What do I do? I'm attaching the save file for debugging purposes.

It's the slippery slope argument every camper uses. You imply there is nothing in between "so easy that it doesn't require any effort" and "so hard you're forced to camp".

You are under false impression that deploying fast your troops from proper open ramp ship will allow you to defeat stronger opponent. Partly you have right, there is window when marginally stronger enemy can be defeated by flooding him with numbers. But this window is narrow and soon your progress will make you on par/stronger anyway. If you are significantly weaker it doesn't work and causes losses that quickly trigger mass panic which is spiral of death. In my previous campaign I lost against Star Gods my main base full of my 30 elites in exactly 4 turns due to mass panic, without killing anybody. I didn't know about them anything and I was at maybe 25% of total research. It was bug hunt for them.

Judging from your comments about campers you don't prefer prudent game style, and because of that personal preference you are forcing everybody to use essentialy zergling rush tactic with high losses. Everybody should play like you, and goal is achieved by designing most of the transporters suitable only to your playstyle.

You also said, that I as a camper won't like 99J6. So I read notes and probably you are talking about changes to morale system. I can't judge it yet, but from description it sounds like you replaced bad and primitive system with even worse one, specifically designed to force everybody to even more agressive playstyle or mass panic will kill all gals. But here I can be wrong, I didn't upgraded to 99J6 yet.

And one more question. I just discovered that I can't send Thunderhorse to Hell Cruise mission. Is this bug or mistake? And if this is on purpose, what logic is behind this, because I can send there Zeppelin?